


All the Time in the Universe

by AuroraWest



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Anniversary, Established Relationship, Far Future, Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Not Really Character Death, REALLY established, Romantic Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:28:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26819572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraWest/pseuds/AuroraWest
Summary: Loki and Stephen have been together a long time. Alongtime. It never gets old.Or, Loki and Stephen Strange, on the occasion of their 500th anniversary.Written for Marvel Spookytober Prompts 2020, day 3: Eternal Relationship
Relationships: Loki/Stephen Strange
Comments: 12
Kudos: 66
Collections: Marvel Spookytober Prompts 2020





	All the Time in the Universe

It had taken Loki a long time to learn a valuable, obvious lesson: you don’t know what the future holds. Even for someone like him, whose life would stretch out millennia, who would watch the rise and fall of shorter-lived beings and their technologies, their civilizations, their worlds, could experience great upheaval in mere moments. Life could take a swing at him and knock him, spinning, from the path that he was sure he’d been on; so sure that he’d never thought to look for other paths that the Norns may have paved for him.

Or not paved, as the case may have been. Some of those paths had been pretty rough, over the years. A slightly more trampled bit of ground to follow; markers on trees. It had rarely been clear.

And then sometimes it was.

Loki woke to the feeling of fingers running up and down his bare back. After all these years, he was attuned to those hands, to every twitch, every tremor; the good days and bad. This was a good day. They were hardly trembling at all, sure as they followed a line up his spine and then back down.

With a smile, Loki turned his face into his pillow, allowing himself to focus on nothing but the sensation of being touched. He felt lips, then the scratchiness of a beard, on his shoulder. “Happy five hundredth anniversary,” a voice said quietly.

Pressed against the pillow, his smile grew broader, but how was he supposed to pretend to remain asleep after that? Loki rolled over, his hand sliding along the familiar groove of Stephen Strange’s hip, as he faced his husband, the love of his very long life, his soul mate. “Counting from when?” Loki asked.

Stephen looked almost the same as the day Loki had pulled him from Valhalla—somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, gray just beginning to pepper his goatee and to spread from his temples to the rest of his hair. This belied his actual age—somewhere in the region of six hundred years old, not counting, obviously, the time he’d spent in Valhalla.

A smile pulling at his mouth, Stephen said, “March 20, 2030.”

“Ah. So this requires _math_.” There was the first fifty-two years. Stephen’s eight hundred years in Valhalla didn’t count, though Loki had been faithful to his memory all that time. How could he have so much as looked at anyone else after Stephen Strange?

Then there were the four hundred and forty-eight years that had come after Valhalla had burned, when Loki had been able to save one person. There were many he could have chosen. He felt guilty that he hadn’t considered any of them, even for a second. Not so guilty that he would have changed his decision, though, nor guilty enough to have ever regretted it.

“Uh huh.” Stephen’s eyes, blue in the light of the spaceship they had spent the last three years on, met Loki’s, wrinkles fanning out at the corners of them. It was so odd, such a continuous marvel, to wake up and see Stephen unchanged year after year—or at least, changed so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. He had refused Asgardian longevity in his first life, not that Loki had known how to grant it. He would have gone to the ends of the universe, to the ends of every universe, if Stephen had wanted it, though.

Things had changed. Valhalla was no more. Stephen had lived his life, had died, had gone there, and now lived again. A second life. This time, Loki had been able to grant the longevity—and Stephen had taken it. “I’m not going anywhere without you ever again,” he’d said as Loki had clutched at him. To be honest, Loki may not have given him the choice. Stephen had been dead for just over eight hundred years and not an hour had gone by that Loki hadn’t missed him in all those centuries; now that he had him back, now that he was flesh and blood and standing in front of Loki again, he would never let him go.

It had been a moot point though. Stephen had felt the same way.

“Mm.” Loki slid a hand over Stephen’s face, leaned forward, and kissed him. Stephen’s kiss was as slow as it had always been. Like they had all the time in the universe. Once they hadn’t. Now they did. Loki still kissed as insistently as he always had. “March 20, 2030,” Loki mused as he broke the kiss. “That’s a long time ago, now.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Stephen said with a grin.

Loki rolled his eyes. “You remember everything, so that’s not saying all that much.”

Stephen’s grin grew more crooked and he wrapped an arm around Loki’s back, pulling Loki against him. Before Stephen had died, during that first life, Loki had mostly slept in pajamas. After Stephen’s resurrection, all Loki had wanted to do was be in physical contact with him, as much skin as possible touching at all times. Honestly, there may have been a six to seven day stretch at the beginning where they hadn’t gotten out of bed, too intent on remembering every plane, every nook and cranny, every dip of bone and muscle, every scar, on each other’s bodies.

With that photographic memory of his, Stephen had had a distinct advantage—that, and the fact that Loki’s body had never changed all that much to begin with. While Stephen’s body had been in a constant state of aging, Loki had remained static. The curse and the benefit of being Asgardian. But Loki had never forgotten what Stephen could do to him, and Stephen had breathed, halfway through the first time, that no amount of remembering could ever make up for the real thing.

Anyway. They were marginally better at keeping their hands off each other these days. _Marginally_. But one of Loki’s favorite parts of the day was getting undressed and sliding under the sheets, feeling Stephen’s warm skin against his.

Of course, Loki _had_ changed. He’d gotten older, in those eight hundred years. For the duration of their first five decades together, Stephen had always appeared older, aging at a normal human rate, the apparent gap of years between them growing more and more jarring as Loki remained eternally, to all appearances, a man in his thirties.

Now, they appeared the same age. Stephen had chosen to remain fifty years old in Valhalla, which Loki hadn’t ever asked about, because he assumed he knew why—it was the age that Stephen had been when the two of them had finally come together. They aged at the same rate now.

Loki had worried at one time that Stephen would get bored with it. With him. After all, Stephen was still human. Nothing about him had evolved or developed for this kind of eternal relationship, being with the same person day in and day out, the same body, the same personality quirks. The slow march of years and of being surrounded by the same people was something Loki was built for. And if Stephen _had_ grown bored with him, Loki wouldn’t have stopped him from leaving. It would have broken his heart, of course, but that was nothing new. Loki was a bit of a perpetual victim of a broken heart.

So far, the worry had turned out to be baseless.

“What do you want to do today?” Stephen asked. “Five hundred years is a pretty big one.”

Smiling slightly, Loki said, “Yes, what is it, the vibranium anniversary?”

“I think that’s one hundred.”

Loki chuckled and played with the hair at the back of Stephen’s neck. “I’m not sure there’s all that much _to_ do. We’re in deep space. We’re so far outside the jump network that it would take months to get back to anything we knew.” Running his fingers through Stephen’s hair, he added, “It’s times like this that I miss our sling rings, I’ll be honest.”

“Yeah.” Stephen kissed him again. “Then again, all my favorite restaurants are closed in the Village, now. There’s not much point in even visiting anymore. The neighborhood’s really changed.”

“The neighborhood is under water,” Loki snorted.

“I think they pulled off kind of a Venice-y thing with the canals.”

Manhattan was actually quite pretty these days, but Stephen was right—it wasn’t _his_ Manhattan, and it wasn’t Loki’s either. Even though Loki had lived on Earth far longer than Stephen had, his Manhattan would always be 21 st century Manhattan, the one he’d walked with Stephen as they’d gotten to know each other, as they’d fallen in love without realizing what was happening.

Though he wouldn’t mind a slice of pizza right now, if he was being honest.

“What do _you_ want to do?” Loki asked. When a sly smile pulled at Stephen’s mouth, the same smile that had led to Loki shedding his clothes at the merest hint of it for five hundred years, Loki said, “I mean, obviously. In between doing that.”

In a musing tone, Stephen said, “How about…we list our five hundred favorite moments together.”

Wrinkling his nose, Loki said, “I may be sentimental, Strange, but I’m not nauseating. Try again.”

Stephen laughed. “You just know I’d win.”

“Oh, so it’s a competition to see who can come up with our relationship’s most romantic moments?”

“Absolutely.” Stephen’s fingers stroked Loki’s back. “There’s a prize for participating.”

“Oh?” Loki asked. “Is it sex? Because it seems to me that I’m getting that regardless.”

“It’s really _great_ sex.”

A smile twitched at Loki’s mouth. “This feels rather like an attempt to trap me into saying we _always_ have great sex.”

“I mean.” With a flash of a grin, Stephen said, “If you want to, I’ll let you cheat and say that all five hundred of our best moments were in bed.”

Arching an eyebrow, Loki replied, “ _In bed_ being merely shorthand in his case, I assume? We’ve had our fair share of… _moments_ in places besides bed.”

His fingers slipping lower, Stephen said, “Remember that time at the US Capitol—?”

Loki laughed. “Those hearings about magic, yes. How could I forget? It was endlessly entertaining watching them tie themselves in knots over my testimony. They had no idea of what questions to ask, let alone the knowledge to understand my answers.” Rolling his eyes, he added, “Fools.”

“Sturdy sinks in the bathrooms, though,” Stephen said.

“ _That_ was the only worthwhile part of the whole ordeal.”

With a chuckle, Stephen asked, “So where are we putting that one on the list? Mid three hundreds?”

Pursing his lips, Loki replied, “Oh, I think at _least_ two hundred and eighty.”

“Okay, okay,” Stephen said. “I guess it’s not every day that the Senate Minority Leader congratulates you on scoring during the recess.”

Loki’s hands, still playing idly with Stephen’s hair, stilled. “That didn’t happen.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows. “Swear to god. He looked jealous. I think he was into you.”

Slipping a hand over Stephen’s neck to rest his fingers on the side of Stephen’s face, Loki said, “Well. You know you’re the only human I’ve ever had eyes for.” When Stephen smiled softly, Loki leaned forward and kissed him, taking his time for once. Five hundred years of kissing Stephen like this—he could do it for five hundred thousand.

“You know I couldn’t possibly limit myself to five hundred of our best moments, even if I was inclined to engage in something so saccharine,” Loki finally murmured, his eyes closed. 

“That _is_ sentimental,” Stephen said. His nose brushed Loki’s, and then the two of them were kissing again slowly. All the time in the universe.

“We’re pretty good together, aren’t we?” Stephen finally asked, minutes later. It might have been longer. If time had a tendency to stand still on these long haul space missions, then the tendency was exacerbated by their hands and mouths on each other.

This bit of understatement made Loki grin. “Well, we _have_ had five hundred years to perfect this,” he said. Unspoken was the fact that they would only get better over the next five hundred, and the five hundred after that.

Loki supposed he still hadn’t answered Stephen’s question about what he wanted to do for _this_ anniversary. Kissing Stephen again quickly, Loki said, “Get up. We’ll have breakfast.”

“Maybe your brother will call and wish us happy anniversary,” Stephen said.

Rolling his eyes good-naturedly, Loki said, “Probably. I suppose we should be dressed if that comes to pass.”

Stephen shifted in bed, propping himself up on an elbow to look down at Loki. Then, running a hand from Loki’s shoulder, down his chest, Stephen said, “I love you.”

Loki put his hand over Stephen’s, which had come to rest over his heart. There was nothing he could do but smile. He had this. It was more than he’d ever thought possible, certainly more than he’d ever thought he deserved. It was everything. “Happy anniversary, Stephen,” Loki said.

Sometimes the path was clear. What the two of them had had been signposted for a long time.

Even though he’d just told him to get up, Loki wrapped his arms around Stephen and pulled him back down on top of him.


End file.
